Saturday, January 31, 2015

The
black & white Universal Westerns of the 1940s were often pretty silly, but
they usually had a certain vim and zip about them, and Badlands of Dakota, a Wild Bill/Calamity Jane picture, was no
exception. It is even more preposterous than most Westerns of the period,
making no attempt at all to stick to fact, but since when did we expect historical
accuracy from Western movies? The important thing is that the film is energetic
and fun.

Energetic

It’s a
nice quality print, not one of those crackly, faded efforts one often sees, and
it holds up well on a big modern TV screen. It was shot by Stanley Cortez
(later the cinematographer on Apache
and Man from Del Rio) with some Red
Rock Canyon locations – Universal didn’t stint on this aspect. The direction is
by Alfred E Green, who had been making large numbers of films since 1912 with
Selig Polyscope. He directed Bette Davis in Dangerous
in 1935 and also later did The Jolson Story
in 1946, so he was no unknown or minor figure. He only made nine Westerns,
though: four silents in the early days and a few B-Westerns subsequently. His
high point, without a doubt, was the charming little Joel McCrea oater Four Faces West in 1948, a little jewel. In Badlands he keeps the pace rattling
along and there’s plenty of action.

Young Robert
Stack was given the lead. Of course, like most people I think of Mr. Stack as
Eliot Ness but he had been at Universal since the 1930s. Badlands was his
first Western, and he only made six, generally eschewing the genre, even in its
1950s heyday. Here he is Jim Holliday, the blond lover of Ann Rutherford and, despite the publicity still below,
not really a gunslinging tough-guy at all. (As an aside, we have said elsewhere that blond men rarely made good Western actors, except maybe as baddies, and Stack knew this; he had his hair dyed black for future roles).

Robert Stack and Ann Rutherford. Not really Western specialists...

He steals
la Rutherford away from his big brother Broderick Crawford, Bob. Of course the
year before Broderick as Bob (Bob Dalton) had also had his fiancée stolen away
from him, that time by Randy Scott, in When the Daltons Rode. He was beginning to get a rep as a jilted lover. Crawford was
ever unconvincing in Westerns. His stockiness (to be polite) didn’t help, but fat
or not, though he was certainly tough, he was too Eastern, too urban to be any
good in oaters. He needed mean streets or a highway patrol car. He was
plain ridiculous in The Fastest Gun Alive
(fanning his double-action Colts) in 1956 and he never cut it as a Westerner.
Still, he liked the genre and appeared in fifteen big-screen oaters altogether, as well as
many Western TV shows. In Badlands he
is a saloon owner who, when thrown over by his belle in favor of his younger
bro, goes bad and dresses up as an Indian with Jack McCall’s gang and holds up
the Deadwood stage. (Yes, I’m afraid the plot is that silly).

Broderick Crawford. Shoulda stuck to tough cops.

Ms. Rutherford
(Scarlett’s little sis in Gone With the
Wind) had been in four Gene Autry oaters and three John Wayne ones before
the war, so she knew her way around the West. She was a graceful woman (if I’m
allowed to say that kind of thing these days), if not entirely convincing ridin’
the range. In Badlands she is rather
bossy and Stack is on the verge of being henpecked (if I’m allowed to say that kind of thing these days).

Jane
(she is never referred to as Calamity) is played by Frances Farmer. Farmer went
to Hollywood in 1935 where she won a seven-year contract with Paramount but in
1943 she was declared mentally incompetent and committed by her parents to a
series of asylums and public mental hospitals. It was a tragic affair. She didn’t
really do Westerns; Badlands was the
last of only three (the previous one, in 1936, had also been directed by Green)
but in the first, Rhythm on the Range
in 1936, she had the female lead opposite Bing Crosby. In Badlands she was, like Crawford, totally unconvincing as Jane,
managing none of the Doris Day-type tomboy charm the role was usually accorded and still less
any genuine pathos.

Frances Farmer. Unconvincing as Jane.

Richard
Dix does Wild Bill Hickok and, despite the daft script, he does it rather
well. As I said in a recent post on another Dix Western, Cherokee Strip, Dix (1893 – 1949) was RKO’s leading man from the
dawn of talkies through 1943. At six foot and 180 pounds, he presented a burly
figure and had been a successful athlete in earlier years (his first roles were
in baseball and football movies). He was quite a box-office draw for RKO in the
30s and he did a good number of Westerns, starting with a Victor
Fleming-directed silent, the first version of Zane Grey’s To the Last Man, in 1923 and finishing with The Kansan in 1943, when he was in his fifties. His most famous
Western role was of course as Yancey Cravat in the 1931 hit Cimarron, for which he won an Oscar. In Badlands, he is a rather dashing Wild
Bill in frock coat, long hair and mustachios. He does not have an affair with Jane
at all, though does ride with her on a posse with Marshal Robert Stack to
capture the bad guys. He shoots a couple of fellows on his first day in Deadwood, presumably to establish his gunslinger street cred, but he is told that it didn't matter at all, they were rogues anyway.
Bill turns down the marshal’s job in favor of Robert. Hickok is duly murdered by
Jack McCall (we just hear the shot and see his corpse draped over the card
table, with the dead man’s hand of aces and eights).

Richard Dix rather good as Wild Bill, with Farmer as Calamity and Addison Richards as Custer

Some of
the minor roles are fun. Lon Chaney Jr. does Jack McCall. His McCall is the
gang leader (“I give the orders around here,” he sternly admonishes fellow
badman Brod Crawford) and has a scam in which he and his hoodlums dress up as
Indians and rob the stage. This means, however, that we have an unintentionally hilarious scene
of Lon Chaney and Broderick Crawford in warpaint and feathers, on their horses waiting to waylay the
stagecoach. Hero Marshal Stack shoots McCall in the end, so he is not hanged at
Yankton for the murder of Hickok.

Lon Chaney Jr., always entertaining, as badman Jack McCall

Custer
appears, impersonated by Addison Richards. This Custer is noble and brave, and
saves the town of Deadwood from a devastating Indian attack (the Sioux burn the
place to the ground) by charging in with the 7th Cavalry at the last moment,
before declaring that he can’t stay: he has to “finally have it out with
Sitting Bull and his Sioux at Little Bighorn”, and he gallops off. Addison
Richards is actually worth looking out for. He appeared in huge numbers of B
and TV Westerns (140 in all) from Lone Cowboy in 1933 to an episode of Rawhide
in 1964. He often did the crusty old-timer or comic sidekick.

Fuzzy
Knight is the stage driver, Hurricane, and duly does his schtick. Andy Devine,
as Spearfish, the MC of the variety show at the Bella Union, ditto. They are
both always fun to see. The Jesters give us some enjoyable songs. Glenn Strange
the Great is there too. Though uncredited, he has a few lines and he’s not just
an extra. He’s a thug, obviously. How I like Glenn-spotting in Westerns.

Andy Devine with Crawford and Chaney

Well,
the whole thing is deeply silly. Still, it’s amusing and entertaining and most
definitely worth a watch if it comes on. I probably won’t buy the DVD though.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

The good
news is that they are still making Westerns. The slightly less good news is
that many of these Westerns are for the TV market or straight-to-video, and are
pretty ordinary. They tend to be ‘safe’ and bear the, er, hallmark of so-called
family entertainment. And the actors all look far too modern, with perfect skin
and teeth. And their diction is 21st century Californian too.

However,
every so often you get one that is a cut above that. Shadow on the Mesa does suffer from the last of the defects listed
(overmodern and unconvincing young actors) but actually it has a sharp edge and
could perfectly well have been made in the 1950s with, I don’t know, Sterling
Hayden or Forrest Tucker in the lead. It is an old B-Western redux. Given the Boetticher/Scott treatment
(or even Mann/Stewart) it could even have been a classy picture. I am sometimes
a tad rude about Hallmark but I do try to be fair and this picture, aired on
that channel, is really not at all bad.

The best
thing about the movie is that Barry Corbin is in it. Older and jowlier, sure,
but still going strong in 2013. Of course Western aficionados (that’s us,
e-pards) will remember Barry best as Roscoe Brown but he has been in a lot of
Western TV shows and is always a delight to see. In Shadow on the Mesa (nice title) he plays the adoptive grandfather of
the hero. It’s rather a talky and inactive part but he does it really well.
Sadly, he is written out after the first reel. If they still have reels.

Probably
the best actor after Barry is Kevin Sorbo, as the hero’s real dad. Hercules has
been in a few oaters and this was his third TV Western (after Avenging Angel and Prairie Fever) and a couple more are projected for this year.

The hero
Wes is played by Wes, with Wes Brown as Wes Rawlins. He’s not an actor I know
(he had a small part in the 2012 Wyatt Earp’s
Revenge) but he isn’t bad as the unsmiling sometime bounty hunter out to
avenge his murdered ma. He does, as I said above, look very modern but you can’t
really hold this against Westerns. Every generation of oater imposed its own ‘look’
on the movies of the day, and we have 50s Western heroes in Brylcreemed hair
and baggy pants. They almost never look like the photographs of the real
Westerners of the time. Except maybe William S Hart in the 1910s.

Another
good actor, in a smaller part, was Dave Florek as the ranch hand Baldy. Gail O’Grady
as Sorbo’s wife, however, showed us that mascara and false eyelashes were
surprisingly common on the nineteenth century prairie. Almost as bad as Shirley
MacLaine in Two Mules for Sister Sara.

It’s the
old tried-and-tested plot about the big rancher trying to drive off the smaller
homesteaders and get the whole valley. Still, nothing wrong with tried and
tested plots.

Don’t
expect too much – it’s Hallmark after all – but this is certainly one of the
better recent TV Westerns.

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Cherokee Strip is a black & white Richard Dix Western of the
early 1940s and as such is hardly a classic of the genre. Still, it has its
points, especially as it features two of the best ever baddies, Victor Jory and
Ray Teal (though the latter, sadly, only in an early bit part).

It was
directed by the excellent Lesley Selander for Harry Sherman Productions and released by
Paramount. Sherman productions dated back to 1918 and they mainly did huge
numbers of the Hopalong Cassidy features from 1935 to 1941. Occasionally,
though, they moonlighted on non-Hoppy oaters. Selander worked his way up in the
silent movie business, became assistant director then got to direct B-movies
galore. His first was a Western, in 1936, and he directed literally dozens,
including many with William Boyd of course, before turning to TV, where he did
dozens more small-screen Westerns, especially episodes of Laramie. He made Shotgun
(which we reviewed recently), The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold and many pictures with the word Fort in the title. About his best Western was Fort Yuma, with Matt Dillon’s brother, Peter Graves. His direction might
be described as workmanlike rather than inspired but he was very good at the action scenes and his movies are well paced.

A B-Western but watchable

As for
Richard Dix (1893 – 1949), he was RKO’s leading man from the dawn of talkies
through 1943. At six foot and 180 pounds, he presented a burly figure and had
been a successful athlete in earlier years (his first roles were in baseball
and football movies). He was quite a box-office draw for RKO in the 30s and he
did a good number of Westerns, starting with a Victor Fleming-directed silent,
the first version of Zane Grey’s To the
Last Man, in 1923, and finishing with The Kansan in 1943, when he was in his fifties. His most famous Western role
was of course as Yancey Cravat in the 1931 hit Cimarron, for which he won an Oscar.

Solid

Cherokee Strip wasn’t that much of a B-movie. It had the
great Russell Harlan (of Red River
fame) doing the cinematography. The writing (Bernard McConville, who wrote a
good number of John Wayne B-oaters in the 1930s) is not at all bad, with
attempts, at least, at subtlety and character development. But with modest
budget, Selander at the helm and pretty minor actors alongside Dix in the cast
it could hardly be described as an A-picture either. Still, it repays a watch.

We are
in Goliath, Oklahoma, where Victor Jory is a classic corrupt banker, Barrett,
who is slimily pretending to have buried the hatchet in a family feud with the
Lovells. But who should turn up in town as the new US marshal but Dave Lovell
(Dix), two-gun strong man (Fighting Marshal
was in fact an alternate title of the film). His belt, probably left over from
a pirate flick, has a huge buckle. For a while everyone pretends that the feud
is over and Victor is now a goody but who could seriously believe that for
long?

The best crooked banker ever

Obviously
there’s a dame for the marshal to fall for. It’s Kate (Florence Rice, only
three Westerns, all B). Dix acts bashful at first, in a William S Hart sort of
way, being especially evasive about his age. There’s equally obviously a comic old-timer
sidekick, Ned (Addison Richards, a regular in that role). There’s a marshal/storekeeper set-up between Dix
and George E Stone as Abe which reminded me of Sol Star and Seth Bullock in Deadwood. There’s a big shoot-out at the
end in which bullets oddly ricochet off straw.

It gets
a two-revolver rating. No picture with Victor Jory as the badman could get only
one. That evil smile!

Sunday, January 25, 2015

I was
always a great Richard Boone fan, ever since a boyhood addiction to Have Gun - Will Travel. He was really
best as an out-and-out badman (my favorite role of his was when he was the evil
Grimes in Hombre) but he could
occasionally also be the good guy. More usually he was a badman who was
fundamentally decent, the classic good badman of Western lore.

Boone in Hombre

Richard Allen Boone
(1917 – 1981) was the son of an LA corporate lawyer, a descendant of Daniel
Boone the frontiersman. He was Pat Boone’s cousin. He was Pontius Pilate in The Robe but his first proper (i.e.
Western) part was in the Delmer Daves-directed Return of the Texan in 1952 (with Dale Robertson and Walter
Brennan) - if you call that a Western. Parts in B-Westerns followed throughout the mid-1950s and of course
he was very good as Wick Campbell, the rotten rival to the rich rancher Randy
Scott in Ten Wanted Men in 1955. In ’57
he was back with Scott as badman Frank Usher in The Tall T. He was already establishing himself as one of the great
Western bad eggs.

CBS’s Have Gun - Will Travel aired from 1957
to 63 (and on radio from 1958 with the excellent John Dehner as Paladin). I
will waffle on at length about this splendid series another day.

One of the best ever TV Western shows

Like many
Hollywood Western leads, however, Boone did the occasional Italian ‘western’ at
the end of his career, or at least in his case between the end of Have Gun and and the start of Hec Ramsey in 1972. One such was Madron, a real dud.

Do not buy the DVD. There is a lie on the cover.

It’s the
Sister Sara plot about the tough hombre
teaming up with a nun on a mule (the Eastwood/MacLaine picture came out the
same year). Wayne and Hepburn used a similar theme in Rooster Cogburn five years later. This time the religious sis in
60s cosmetics is French-born Leslie Caron, in her only Western. She is rather beautiful, though.

Sister Mary. The West seemed to have teemed with nuns with guns.

The picture
is slow and too long. It has bad music (you know, harmonica and electric guitar
dross), poor color and is dubbed. The version I saw was heavily censored. It was shot in Israel. It’s
a typical Eurowestern, in fact.

It was
directed by an American, at least, Jerry Hopper, a former Paramount editor. He had
cut his teeth on the clunky Pony Express
in 1953 and also directed Dana Andrews in Smoke Signal but was mostly known for TV Westerns, especially episodes of Wagon Train. He also directed Boone a
few times in Have Gun. Hopper didn’t
have much of a sense of pace (surprising for an editor, perhaps) and his movies
all have parts which drag.

Leo
McMahon and Edward Chappell wrote it. McMahon did a lot of stunt work on 1930s
B-Westerns and graduated to writing TV shows later. It was co-writer Chappell’s
only Western. The writing of Madron is
plodding. At one point they seem to quote The Wild Bunchbut get it wrong, “I wouldn’t have it no other way.”

The hero’s
name is pronounced muh-drone with the stress on the second syllable and he
wears his poncho. There’s the inevitable pool in the desert so the nun can undress.

Tough hombre in a poncho

On the
DVD cover it says “One of the best adult Westerns since Shane” which would be laughable if it weren’t such an arrant lie. I
call it One Mule for Sister Mary and
it’s lousy, but I don’t suppose they’d want to put that on the DVD cover.

Friday, January 23, 2015

Universal
made a lot of Westerns in the 1950s. It was one of their favorite genres. And
they tried out various actors as lead. They were fond of Rock Hudson, whom they
had used in Scarlet Angel, Seminole, The Lawless Breed and Taza, Son of Cochise, and Jeff Chandler, who had been Cochise for Fox in Broken Arrow in 1950 and became
Universal’s tame Indian chief (or occasionally cavalryman) from The Battle at Apache Pass (1952) onwards.
Their fallback was of course Audie Murphy, who made a lot of fairly formulaic
but nevertheless solid oaters, and, like all Universal’s pictures, they were
competently directed, had reasonable budgets, and were usually nicely photographed
in attractive Western locations.

The
studios were using Tony Curtis for their Arabian
Nights series and it was logical to try him out in a Western or two. He’d
had a bit part in Winchester ’73 in
1950, a bigger role as a Dalton in the Audie oater Kansas Raiders the same year, and also appeared with Audie in another
early-50s Western, Sierra. So they gave
him a go as lead in 1955, in The Rawhide
Years. It didn’t take and he wasn’t really cut out for the genre but The Rawhide Years isn’t bad. The most amusing
part is Tony’s hair but we’ll let that pass.

They got
the posh Rudolph Maté to direct. Universal usually used second (but not third)
ranked directors but Maté was rather top drawer. Polish born, he had studied in
Budapest and worked under Alexander Korda and became one of Europe’s leading
directors (and cinematographers). He came to Hollywood in 1935 and although he
didn’t make any really great films (the 1950 noir D.O.A. was about his best) he certainly enjoyed great prestige.
Westernwise, he worked under William Wyler as cinematographer on The Westerner in 1940, then directed
Alan Ladd in Branded in 1950. The Mississippi Gambler with Tyrone
Power in 1953 was followed by Siege at Red River in 1954 (the latter distinctly B) and so The Rawhide Years was his fifth sally out onto the range. Later he
did The Far Horizons, The Violent Men (his best Western) and Three Violent People. None of these was what you would call a classic
but they were all perfectly watchable.

Tony is young
Ben Matthews, a cheating gambler on the Montana Queen. He finds a father figure
inMatt Comfort, a rancher (Minor Watson)
whom he has ruined at the tables, but the rancher is then murdered (there’s a
piece of business with a wooden cigar-store Indian). Once docked in Galena, Ben’s
cheating partner (Donald Randolph) is wrongly lynched by the townsfolk for the
killing. So Ben leaves his fiancée, the saloon gal Zoe (Colleen Miller, Rory
Calhoun’s squeeze in Four Guns to the Border) and goes on the run, to avoid a similar fate. He works his way West,
cowboying, hence the title. That title is a bit odd though because the rawhide
years take up very little of the movie. He is soon back in Galena, where he
hopes to disculpate himself and get Zoe back.

During
his travels (sorry, drifting) he has reluctantly teamed up with professional
charming rogue Arthur Kennedy and got into scrapes. There’s a bit where they
have to jump into the river from a cliff to evade pursuit and one can’t swim;
probably the makers of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidhad seen that scene. The rest of the movie tells how, with
Arthur’s aid, Tony uncovers the plot, proves his innocence and gets the girl, in
traditional fashion.

Zoe has
a couple of saloon songs, naturally, and there’s an intensely enjoyable bit
with garter derringers. Peter van Eyck is the Frenchie saloon owner, a rather
classic villain. Despite his Netherlandish name van Eyck was Pomeranian born
and was good for any Nazi-ish bad guy you wanted in a movie, and if he is
supposed to be the froggy André Boucher in this one, well, European is European,
ain’t it? Anyway, director and Euroexile Maté perhaps liked the idea. Best of
all, however, is the fact that André’s right hand henchman is Robert J Wilke,
my hero.

The whole
thing is even more improbable than the average Western and Curtis is not
convincing as the naïve underdog who becomes a tough cowboy who beats the bad
guys and wins the fair maid.

A lot of
the blame must go to screenplay writer Earl Felton, though the great DD
Beauchamp did also work on the script. Still, there are shoot-outs and
explosions and fistfights, and a whodunit murder story (though you don't need to be Columbo to work out who is the guilty party). There are nice
Technicolor shots of Lone Pine locations (Universal’s Western go-to Irving
Glassberg behind the camera, of Bend of the River fame). It’s fun, really.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

In Westerns
there was a man from everywhere. Everywhere in the West, that is. One thinks principally,
of course, of The Man from Laramie,
but let us not neglect those men from Arizona,
Bitter Ridge, Button Willow, Colorado, Dakota, Del Rio, Galveston, Monterey, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Sundown, Texas, Wyoming, the Alamo and the Tumbleweeds,
to name but a few. Yup, Hollywood sure liked the man from… titles. And firmly in the category is the 1930s
Monogram programmer with John Wayne, The
Man from Utah.

A classic of the genre. I guess.

John
Wayne’s career was at the following point: as a prop boy he had been an
uncredited extra in two Westerns (1926 and 1930), had then starred for Raoul Walsh
in 1930 in The Big Trail, had then
slipped back into obscurity, took lower billing on three appallingly bad Westerns for Harry Cohn at Columbia in 1931/32, swore he would never work for
Cohn again, made six really quite nice little Westerns for Warners 1932/33 (one
of them another Man from title), and
then started on his career with Lone Star/Monogram which lasted till the demise
of the studio in 1935; he then continued with the employers under their new
guise of Republic, which lasted till 1949 when he made his last Republic Western,
The Fighting Kentuckian. The Man from
Utah was the sixth of nine Monogram oaters he made in 1934 alone.

Still,
it must also be said that they are a whole lot of fun and if you do watch them
you’ll pass a pleasant few hours. They are all black & white, last roughly
an hour and often had actors who were part of a ‘stock company’ and so become
very recognizable as the series progresses. The
Man from Utah is no exception.

It’s a rodeo picture and you can ask whether rodeo
films are true Westerns. Some aren’t, really, because of their modern setting and/or
because the themes they deal with aren’t very ‘Western’ in the true sense.
Still, they are often highly enjoyable and some of them (The Lusty Men, Junior Bonner,
others) are works of art. The Man from
Utah could not, sadly, be put in this work-of-art category. But it is,
nominally, set in the old West, with cowboys sporting shootin’ irons on their
hips and classic Western skullduggery going on. I say ‘nominally’ because you
occasionally glimpse an automobile or modern telegraph lines and so on (and on
one occasion a sign announcing an event in 1932) but it doesn’t matter in the
least. In any case old Westerns had no complexes about mixing the ancient and the
modern and Tom Mix oaters, for example, are full of planes and cars. The
leading ladies always wore 1930s dresses and frizzy hairdos.

Amusing poster

It’s set in Nevada (though shot in California and the
rodeo footage comes from Calgary).

Anyway, we’ve got RN Bradbury in the director’s chair
(‘Robert Bradbury’ he is billed as, which sounds grander somehow), his 72nd Western (he had directed his first in 1918!). Robert was Bob Steele’s dad and
often starred the boy in his oaters, though not, sadly, in Utah.

Gabby Hayes is also there, of course, though no ‘Gabby’
is mentioned; he is grandly billed as ‘George Hayes’. He is the marshal, a
rather hillbilly one, and Duke is his deputy (he’s ‘John Weston’ this time,
geddit?).

John Weston with Marshal Gabby

And naturally Duke’s pal Yak Canutt is there as the bad guy Cheyenne Kent and supervising the stunts. Best of all, for me, is the fact that the rodeo announcer is Earl Dwire, my hero. He usually has an old Western megaphone to shout through but occasionally they forgot that and he has a modern microphone. Oops.

Yak is the bad guy Cheyenne

There’s mucho galloping (often with speeded-up film), and rootin', tootin' and, of course, shootin',
and the ‘acting’ is, as usual, dire. They stand to attention, shout the lines
they have learned (or read them off cards) and then wait motionless for their next
cue. The writing (Lindsley Parsons, as so often) is so pedestrian that actually even if the
cast were Laurence Olivier and Meryl Streep they’d still be no good.Actually, I'd rather like to see Olivier and Streep in a Western. Dream on.

There’s
some dynamite at the end and a river and a kiss. At one point Duke sits on a
white horse and croons (or lip-syncs anyway) to the sound of his guitar.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Credit
to early-1950s Hollywood for making a Western movie about a woman but of course
the central character couldn’t receive top billing. She was only a female after
all. So the wooden Jack Buetel was placed at the top of the cast list. He acts
(if that’s the right word) the role of Marshal Hollister, destined, we know
from the opening of the first reel, to woo and win the fair heroine. The top
billing should have gone to Mala Powers, the eponymous Rose.

These 50s publicity stills are hilarious sometimes

The beautiful Ms.
Powers is known as the queen of B sci-fi flicks but in fact she had a promising
start to her career before illness intervened. She was a protégée of the great
Ida Lupino who auditioned and approved her for the female lead role in The Outrage (a role which eventually
went to Claire Bloom). Rose of Cimarron
was Mala’s first Western and she’s really rather good in it, despite the rather
clunky script and direction. Later, she was a regular of TV Western shows.

We start
when some Indians attack a wagon train in a studio (though we only see one
wagon, budget constraints being what they were). A mother hides a baby in a
trunk and is then killed, along with all the other whites. An Indian finds the
orphan and raises the infant as his own daughter. This noble Cherokee, Lone
Eagle, is none other than good old Monte Blue, born in 1887 and veteran of
Westerns ever since Martyrs of the Alamo
in 1915. He is murdered though, along with Rose’s adopted mum, by some evil bad
guys. Rose sure loses parents at a rate of knots. At least they didn't make Belle Starr Rose's mother, as they did in Belle Starr's Daughter.

Rose grows up as a rather improbable Cherokee girl, riding astride
in buckskin pants with a rifle and two-Colt gunbelt and huntin’ and shootin’
with her bro, Willie Whitewater, played by none other than Jim Davis, with
enough Brylcreem on his head to keep the company afloat for years.

Must have had shares in Brylcreem

Rose also
has rather coiffed 50s hair and make-up. Jim becomes a Tonto-esque sidekick to
Rose. Rose speaks strangely good English for one who has been all her life with
the Cherokee.

Tight buckskin pants for the Cherokee maid

After
the murder of Rose’s Indian mum and dad, she and Willie go off to Dodge and the
rest of the movie takes place there. Of course Rose wants to find the villains
who shot down Mr. and Mrs. Lone Eagle, and Dodge is as likely a town as any to
find them. Sadly, there’s no Masterson or Earp in Dodge, only Jack Buetel.

Bill
Williams is George (not Bittercreek) Newcomb, a rather good baddy in black. Brooklyn-born
ex-professional athlete Williams had been a stalwart of Westerns since the
mid-1940s and was to become very well known on the small screen in pretty well
every Western TV show you could name. You may also remember him as the sheriff
in Rio Lobo.

Bill is backed up by
other henchmen, notably Art Smith as the old rogue Deacon and the great Bob
Steele doing his usual splendid badman act as Rio. An instantly recognizable
John Doucette is another henchperson.

The main
weakness is poor Jack Buetel, though, as the marshal who tries to do the right
thing and imprisons Rose for shooting a villain or two (it’s the Cherokee way,
she informs him).

The Cherokee way

But of course he loves her and eventually, together, they right
the wrongs, you know how they do. Mr. Buetel (1915 – 1989) famously played
Billy the Kid opposite Jane Russell in the dreadful The Outlaw (released 1943), he was third-billed in Best of the Badmen, and Rose was his first Western starring
role. He was a lousy Frank James in Jesse James’ Women in ’54 and then became Edgar Buchanan’s sidekick Jeff in Judge Roy Bean on TV. In an acting competition between Jack and a block of wood, Jack, to be fair, would probably win.

Well, Rose of Cimarron is an undistinguished B-Western really but I have seen a lot worse. I've given it two revolvers (it probably only deserved one) for Bob Steele and Jim Davis's hair.